Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Knowledge Structures And The Vocabulary Of Engineering Novices, Anita Coleman

Faculty Publications

This presentation is based on the refereed paper published in the ISKO 8 proceedings (see References for citation). It describes a study of the language used by undergraduate engineering students engaged in a civil engineering laboratory. Learnerâ s concepts and relationships in the area of soil consolidation were elicited in order to provide an understanding of the structural knowledge of novices and compare it with the knowledge structures of a human expert and a thesaurus tool. Concept maps and pathfinder networks were used to visualize and analyze the resultant knowledge structures of novice learners, expert, and tool. Results show that …